blue-collar mad scientist

Yor laf in m' fangers gimme dread deepina bawlz,
Sorta whut you muss feel ravaging yr taunting food
Sep it's a kinda love too as I let care grow b'tween us.
In this hot room moisture prickles erywhere b'cause
you have evolved from a 2-bit preacher to a
national shivstar lottery queen from all I'm doing,
along with the searing truth 'n chance of electricity.

You think I'd risk my tam with Jan 'n the kiyuds
'f I dint know there was sum'm better t' provide
lak a day unner direck sunlight, stan on a real hill,
outta cement caves n' twilight of wan superstition?
I want yor skeletosis to tell a story longer than th' both of us.
You can raise bribes 'n forces, try 'n blend inta rustic corrals
while yr frens tie 'n kite you with ideals 'n booshia.

But because you have killt fr hunger, shiny coins, boredom,
or jus the sum of whut you were born being worth,
We cn bestow on you 'n honor greater than th' crusader kings
as you unfold these thinly fleshed and hideous wings
and a war helmet's gouging horn is organic to your face.
You may rise now awful Chama, and step in terrble knowingness!
Epistles loaded in yr chips will tip you into streaks of righteousness!


Wayne
Beta Invocation of Operational Systems

Hunger's always a bran new idea

Kep dreaming of a patteren or a mark:
from when they drove me spanking from poverty?
Regardless of how I'd been, I would be holy.
The gowns and injections, the bars.
I had to learn to twirl like a goat on a pin.

There were circles, lines, and curved lines.
Faces aimed at me filled the biggest caves.
At least no one marches a goddess around by the elbow.
She pulls on ropes, reveals tureens of fragrant smoke.
Preservation Society pays her in cash from the plate.
There is public housing for these special creatures.

Wayne, I'm awake.


Chamatilly, to the rescue

Wreck Command

We're sensing some activity in the Crack
swimming bird-fish, topless
aframerican in her 30's
just picking up the skeletry
but it appears to be a cartilage-web
cape-like wing of light
and she's cutting on up through
the bog suspension with her beak.
There's a broken transmission:

...ckgghggk... donna... ckghk...

I Sit and Drink before a Screen

Rock rolling, in packs, against effigies, has been preserved.
Some flakes even stream in hoopties to communal slurp holes,
risk getting picked off by the sensation grid or spoiling a life.
Gods of atroposis can bareback their amygdalas and view.

Once you buy the razor wires for yr pinfold, the bolts and screws
close automotively, as at sunset for grain bank doors.
Yr consciousness and shiny coins are disbursed in the heavens.
All the moisture you can carry is your hydroelectric insurance.

Donna
"For Illyn"

journal of a house arrest, day 106

at least down at central lockup you had yr hell is other peoples;
a pretty prison soltera, even with dogs, may become agorapathic.
she sits in the sand with the bitches guarding, hoping, dozing.
her hair pushes through the squares of chain link fencing.
Donna, you are beautiful, but look at you:
a free tumbleweed with caramel tinge, mashed in a blockade.
whooda known you'd steadily become a morbid-ideating blob?

Phyllis, embedded

Aquarian song

i used to rilly morn my swimmin' days,
but now that i cn post strokes to the POD,
i can sweat both sloth and malaise
so long as you can hear my aquarian song:

you gonna make my crossed-eyes cry nau,
break me till i can't buy ice or cigarettes.
ima gawda liquids baybee, with one regret:
that we dint goda the lenths that we coulda had.

Mike
"For Hoolie"

al be-ashamed tomorrow

al be-ashamed tomorrow, al be-ashamed at the end of it all.
al cop a plea an take a fifth of whatever been a-served to thee.

Them wrecks, them crimz them scavs... it's why we discriminate,
but al take the fall, for brotherhood sake an unanimity.

Wayne

Lab lockdown

Once i cd lift her with skin and blood alone on thigh power.
With pills you get full flower but it's not the same at the crux of the elbow:
Yr torso is just the main balloon in a multi-twisted limb affair.
Where soul reached out with all its might from a crown of hair,
There's a big-assed parasitic worm feeding just below the breaking point.

Wayne
Lab lockdown, Day 2

Believing

i hope you'll always let me go on believing yr better than me
because it's all i can figure about trying to grow

no matter how much you thrash in yr upper berth,
i feel so stable below, and no matter how much it

hurts, yr taking it on like someone just a shade more
innocent, in fact yr skin is translucent.

i hope you'll always let me go on believing i'm silly and
ignorant; i want to fill each hour with questions for you.

no matter the lonesome excuses for touching my cradle
i know you'll keep me alive enough to stay an embryo.

Reptily
Waking up as the Chama, to Wayne's sweaty face

Sistah Grupe

Facts n' truth others kempt buried in serial tracts n' novels,
proverbial irritable pearls of horror they had to tease into,
Are what's splattered each line of my songs in murdrous staccato.

When someone who should be dead for the pain either or longevity,
wuman kep alive so's she can go on wailing in societies and snack pits,
A pall will still set in stuck like the sun on a jet wanting mostly to get down.


Sistah Grupe pome:
Donna
Chama
Phyllis, ed.

Phyllis in a cilice

Meanwhile, Dr. Thong has her toes spread between the railings of the brass bed in her cell. She is painting them with a q-tip from a bottle cap with a solution of urea and Pink Bismuth heated up atop the radiator.

Someone is with her: Phyllis, in a salt-and-pepper fall, natural mock cilice and denims on a folding chair. Her purple lipstick is inappropriate.

DONNA: She'd be very upset to know you were here.
PHYLLIS: But I'm a reporter. I get to be in on all the angles.
DONNA: Yeah, you put the bed in embedded.
PHYLLIS: Allz I did was sign up to express her preen gland. It took weeks to get clearance.
DONNA: As if you could step back through the Crack anyway. You can't mend two worlds with a few strands of horse-like hair.
PHYLLIS: Hmm. You noticed. [PAN FROM ONE TO THE OTHER OF HER BREASTS]
DONNA: Maybe she'll come to us. She could get me out of here.

[FLUORESCENT CEILING TUBE BUZZES AND FLICKERS]

PHYLLIS: You know Dr., time travel is a bunch of b'caca. But light beams come and go as they please. A deity can do that.
DONNA: Now you insult my sense of connectedness. Isn't it much more likely yr pal Wayne over at PharmSupply has been pumping up his experiment?
PHYLLIS: Are you saying you'd be down with RMP if it could bring back the Chama?
DONNA: I'm saying I'm a doctor and I know an evil phuck of a shrink when I smell one.
PHYLLIS: Illyn, her brother, does it the hard way. No one blames him for crawling out the Mthyuh's stinking rubble erry tam a generation almos fergets.
DONNA: You are sinking into superstition, and it's unbecoming of journalism.

Wayward kernel

My brushes with decadent company
kep me spinning to the edges;
alls I could feel was stomach punches.

All the fine living in the balconies,
Pearl rings on gloves perched at brass
railings, made time reach like a feather bed.

Finely now change has found a patteren,
jarring as a cart trip on wheels squared,
with the high points blunted, knowing yor

No where, and are traveling there.
You see faces peering over and viewing
your spin like a weather cock or crucifix

In a sunk diorama of storytime ruin: a
damasela's eyes pecked out as the Failed
Shepherdess, calcified, weeps in her coats.

Quietly now it's the engine I question, the
spark that was supposed to be pushed along
to regenerations of florid qualms and spies.

How can a squiggle in a dish be intensified
by anyone's cynical easy moonlit labors
if she too is powered by a wayward kernel?

Connie, in retrospection

Dog cart

Harsh Sunrise

Like grapes, it peels my eyes.
It's no time to shine a light on.

They say radiation splinters t' kill,
That death is a smoothing guiding.

But here is what the night's been unable to heal:
an accumulation of daytime crusades n' missions.

Grant me one more hour behind the screen,
No inconsequential might from worlds away.

When my features have realigned
, it will be time to hunt and forage.


Illyn, rocking in a dog cart without a rug

punchawune

if youda ast me fo fi yee ago
will you still take this ryusk
knowing how it cd all come down

ida sed shoreall still doit
anow can we pleez goda bayut?
nowahsay godledit eyun.

juscuz yr brave dzn mean
war dzn hurt, chall.
loviz justda punchawune,

a site wayr bloodflow easy,
an irritation ana cerse,
wayr sunthing began to nerse.

Reptily, age 13

Mordon holy star

Spittle forming on his lips, Mike feverishly tries to force his sturdy plastic tubing neon-look Mordon holy star, with its loose and twisted cabling, into a cardboard box. ERUSOLCEROF FO GNIRFFO is spelled in backwards letters on the translucent paper sign taped to the picture window behind him. The points of the star are making every angle impossible. Finally he whips the star back out of the box, hitting himself on the forehead with the plug, drop kicks the box into the fireplace and storms down a long hall to the sliding glass back door and further down wide stone steps and onto a cement patio from which he discus-hurls the star into a low puddle of yellow foam at the bottom of the pool. As it flies, it resembles a spiky brain and spinal cord set free.

SIX MONTHS EARLIER:

Doorbell rings. Mike, wearing nothing but a denim shop apron and flip-flops, hears the chime from a backyard loudspeaker deep within a nest of scarlet bougainvillea. He drops the pool robot, whose tank treads are already turning eagerly, into murky water. He geishas up the stone steps and the long hall and to the front door, near which a glowing blue Mordon star can be detected from behind the living room sheers. The open door frame reveals a middle-aged couple smiling quizzically.

Hello. We noticed your star. Are... you a Mordon family, and if so, what are you doing for No-Shiv? Hmm, we are the leaders of the Mordon community in the chank, and I have a red box gathering every year at our home-- it's a Chalk tradition. That's Dick, and I'm Embhra.

Dick, Embhra; Mike. Well, I'm not a family, or-- we're not a traditional family. By the way I am one-sixteenth Mordon, and on the mother's side, but I am Shiv, brought up Shiv. Uhm, for many reasons, including the obvious need for diversity in Chalk Chank, I decided to show respect for the other part of my heritage this year. When I say we're not a traditional family, me and the folks that tend to live in this house, I mean there is no legal contract, and we are of mixed and questionable gender. I'd love to come!

Mordon holy star [the Mp3]

Her father was not Satan

Jan tries to convince a panel that her father was not Satan:

Anyone with a key to the mill is suspect, first of all. There's work to be done there; you can't make a watch list of everyone that leaves a fingerprint knowing the beast doesn't prolly even have one, do you know? And it's not because I wd be the Daughter, assholes. Whut wd that mean, anyway? Spawn of the devil indicates... are you good bad neutral. That's not been nailed down. A demon wd hang around and try to assimilate someone willfully or situationally ignorant, don't you think? OK I'm evil and I'm going to wear you because you are a sensitive searching self tortured hotty of a mess? I mean even after his cuticles became rotted with nail fungus Daad was irresistibly naive and focused on traditional virtue as a hair shirt, tio. OK, so I can speak the language of the Inquisition, and that was handed down to me by some sort of gothic nazi antihero that fits the cascading style sheet of the gift shop down at yr local lyric-opera joss house?

Jan Janzdaad: Plea of Patrimony
An Annual Public Oracle Dispenser Volca Series Event
"Only double red moon in recorded history."

Chilling howls

We're in a ditch, bottom of a moat that curls part way round a moun'n and sucks wind in from the ocean. Relief filter graphics show how a storm's plasm turns from maroon to turquoise as it pushes across Mthyuh's peak. A pink thunderhead in a sheet reaches in from the shores and up through the pass just skirting the lower chanks and back again to rejoin its northerly impulse. It's raining noisily. Feral pups squat with their ears back on rocky hillsides and search for their mothers along washes in the lightning flashes.

Peg appears sopping wet in some kind of buffalo fur hotpants and bra. She scoops the wayward babies into the fossil of a pelican bill, but giant, and drags them off in their hope boat of bone by rope to a distant glowing cave.

Phyllis, Embedded
SSCB

prison snitch

ladies, when you took my boyfriends, I told other women.
gentlemen, i saw whut you did too, but why so violent?
here we must all swing from pole to pole, but so much friction?

like an embattled civil servant, i skulked through the lunchroom.
can't sell my tics, my shiv's a pacifier, can't get my mind around it.
where was all the love i knew with mike and ken and stu and...

here in prison, they say it's *a* hard life when really it's a whole
hard life, longer than most flakes could ever notice, and then,
they say, in retrospect it won't have been that long in the next life.

i'm sorry you stopped buying my tics, but a woman has to hedge herself,
and sometimes it's shrill as a scream. it wasn't like i was running a
racket. you only become a prison snitch when all hope has soured.

Donna
Incarceration, Hour 3
"Please come for me, Mike"

Gaping laxity

Wayne and Jan's first year went by in Jan's Dad's four-clawed bed above the family-owned mortuary cosmetics forge:

"You saved me."
"I bought you."
"I hustled you."
"You made me."

Wayne and Jan had saved one another, but each still carried the shame of the lower chanks. Wayne's lowest impulse was to disrespect Jan because he bought her in an alley. Jan's lowest impulse was to disrespect Wayne because he grew up in that alley. In moments of doubt, absent parties were heavily considered:

"He bought you."
"I brought you to him."
"But you're mine."
"He owns us both."
"Let's have kids."

Jan wanted to adopt the ugly child who had been spying on them from under a truck. Wayne said ok if they could take her brother too, a baby covered in scars. Reptily explained that the tot in its wooden crib was really her uncle, who had been 27 only a few days earlier, before leaping from a cliff-side prayer station into Mthyuh's roiling gut.

"He's a re-baby."
"I can guide his nature."
"She could be beautiful as a topless aframerican in her 30's."
"There's something in yr daddy's lab we can use to cure those scales."

The expectant couple had to step back through the crack tho to find the chillen. There were hunnerds of years of folds and recriminations. Jan and Wayne were not afraid because the momentum of their luck in meeting had brought them safely to righteous lives and prolly forced the muscles of time into a gaping laxity.

the last time i came was with you

the last time i came was with you
but it wasn't like getting off on youth
it was more about respecting me and our
relationship

the last time i came with you
was a vacation from being a gender puppet
; you went ahead and acted subservient.

the last time we came it came unglued:
our construction of an oppressor's paradigm
, the wasted thoughts we paid for admission

the last time i came was with you
the last time i came was with you
the last time i came was with you

[repeat]

[thelasttimeicamewaswithyou the Mp3]